The Gray Girl & the Ruby

Once upon a time there was a girl who did everything right. Her hair was as golden as a goose’s egg, her voice was like a summer stream laughing over silver-splashed rocks, her teeth were white and straight as two strands of pearls, and she was nearly always smiling (never, of course, during moments of others’ misfortune).

And? What terrible fate befell her? What drew the clouds across her sunny brow and made her question every comfortable belief she’d built her many accomplishments upon?

Nothing! Nothing at all unpleasant ever happened to her! She lived in a state of generous ease and achievement that none but the sinfully jealous could resent!

But what a torment to those few she was. To stand at the crossroads, your feet aching and tired and cold because your family had no horse, because you had never had enough extra to pay the cobbler for the best leather, because you had to walk to find work, and walk far. Ah! To see her glide by in her trim little carriage, and, worse, to hear her reign the horse in, the hoofbeats slowing to a stop, and then to see her shining face lean out, hear her lilting voice: Where are you going? And, Would you like a lift?

Of course you would like a lift– from a sudden pot of gold dug up in the field, an unexpected inheritance from a forgotten, distant relative, from a fortunate twist to your own past so that it was, instead, you so free with compliments and favors and loans and carriage rides, and her looking bedraggled and stubborn halfway through a week-long walk. You wanted to be lifted up to heaven by two white doves, not given bread and kindness by strangers day after unpredictable day.

You shake your head and wave her on. You don’t know it, but this is her only sadness, and it is the same as yours: to feel need and loneliness, and be unable to do anything about it.

Once, there was a poor wretch whose eyes and hair and even skin were often gray. Who ‘went to sleep in her dirt’ night after night for lack of a bathtub, for want of the ease of hauling water, or extra wood for heating the fire. And she was all the more sorrowful for thinking she was to blame for it– that Judgement had been passed by Whatever-It-Was that could see the whole arc of her life, and she had not managed to measure up. Her life was one of cabbage and porridge, and field work or house work, and salting it all with the same flavor: a mixture of resentment and despair. And underneath it all, like the heat in the heap of dung, the question: What did I do to deserve this? And, What am I doing wrong that it continues?

It’s the heat that turns waste into rich soil, but there’s an unavoidable stink all the while it’s happening. It was the heat that drew the gray girl back, night after night. It was the sense– a dream, almost– of something buried within (a ruby? Something red and bright) that had her turn and turn the pile.

In a good story, we hear how it all works out for this girl– how she finds the ruby, or perhaps the long-lost ring belonging to the golden girl, and how they become best friends, how they are as two sisters, never alone or too rich or too poor again. Or how the fortune comes another way and our waif of the world meets fortune’s favorite at a ball, and, and, and–

Can we do nothing for her, now, unhappy as she is? Are buried treasures and benevolent dead relatives the only way to a happy ending? Can there be no happy– or even marginally-better middle? We could give her a cat to tame. Or someone worse off than she to stir pity in her heart. She has next to nothing, but still, she can slow her walk, extend a hand, ask of someone even lower in the muck, Do you want a lift?

And the Judgement eases, fades. The sense of doom of Cabbage and Porridge and Failure Forever now has a subtle, different smell: to share the gruel she so resents with one more hungry than she– to see another disregard the stink and revel in the warmth (the dung heap’s and her own)– it softens something.

And soon, very soon, she discovers that the tears she cries make piles of diamonds. And the tightness in her chest that becomes a lump in her throat– she gasps, she coughs: a ruby, big as you please, glinting hard truths, radiating what was there all along: the thing that gathers beggars and blessed alike: the treasure, the fire, within.

Photo by National Galleries of Scotland on Unsplash

Thanks for reading this original folktale.